“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.”

I came across this quotation this morning from the architect Le Corbusier. My sense is that this sentiment was issued somewhat cantankerously, and I know from firsthand experience that drawing is frequently not faster than talking, but it got me thinking about drawing, and writing, and people who are new to both. How common it is for a young person to crave time for drawing, and how attached we are to getting kids to write, and soon.

Several years ago I met with a mom and her seven year-old. The seven year-old was fiercely committed to drawing at the time (two years later he took up painting and landed a local gallery showing). Meanwhile, his mom was worried about his sloppy handwriting. I watched him do a little of each, the drawing and the writing. I suspected that he was indeed struggling a bit with the formation of letters, but he was also resistant to the act and it seemed that resistance was playing its own part. When he was drawing, he had enormous patience with himself for getting a line or a mark just the way he wanted it. If it didn’t come out right at first, he’d try again until he got it.

This child’s mom and I decided that it might be worth holding off on forced handwriting practice, because it seemed as though the motor function required to neaten up the writing and get it flowing more easily and less stressfully might well come as a side effect of her son’s drawing practice.

I saw these two again a year later. The now eight year-old still preferred drawing to writing (his temperament is such that I suspect he’d have agreed with old Le Corbusier about the talking) but the difficulty with the handwriting had settled itself out. “I stopped bothering him about it,” the mom told me. “It made sense that the drawing would help his hand get stronger and more used to forming the lines he intended.” She smiled. “I had to be patient, and trust him, and it worked. Maybe I’ll learn my lesson from that.”